concious versus unconcious learning

Yesterday I had a discussion with another autistic on Twitter and it led to me having a though about “talent” and skill.

But thanks to pondering it a bit further it really comes down to concious learning and unconcious competence. There is a no such thing as innate talent, everything is learned at some point.

To prove my point, you have those kids that never were abused, that grew up in a single room. With not enough social contact and they never catch up. They never fully gain the competences to become fully social.

I think it’s the same for autistics. We don’t abide by societies rules of social contact, we play by our own rules. Put two autistics together and let them have a conversation and it perfectly goes. We can have constructive conversations without all the extra things that society expects of us, but put us together with neurotypicals and all our autistic social conventions go out the door and we become a lot less secure, because we had to learn your rules of social behaviour and conversation conciously, sometimes by even studying a book (I had to learn how females exhibit love interest from a dutch book on neurology to be able to see them and react to them).

We are aware that we had to learn these conventions of naurotypical social conduct conciously this is why,this is my theory, are aware of our ineptness and constantly try to learn, and behave better.

It is not the other way around. We as autistics have our way of conversation, even in text, which I have been made concious more than once, but conversation amongst autistics goes flawlessly.

The other way around, with neurotypicals, we are the one flawed, because they never had to learn social conduct conciously. They were never aware that they were inept (although they often are). They would rather blame you of being rude, than facing the fact that they started it all, that they gave the comments to which and autistic could react in no other way than seeming rude (although often we just give the facts, nothing more).

I think this is all a matter of learning models, not social ineptness of autistics.